Keen to push industry on electrified vehicles, Prime Minister Theresa May held a roundtable in Downing Street with representatives of leading automotive manufacturers on Monday, confirming the guarantee to Tata-owned Jaguar Land Rover from credit agency UK Export Finance.


Tata-owned Jaguar Land Rover, which earlier this month announced a new range of electrified vehicles, has been extended a £500 million guarantee by the UK government to support the company’s design and manufacture of the range and its export activities.


Keen to push industry on electrified vehicles, Prime Minister Theresa May held a roundtable in Downing Street with representatives of leading automotive manufacturers on Monday, confirming the guarantee to JLR from credit agency UK Export Finance.


Infrastructure to charge electrified vehicles is one of the major challenges in the push. The representatives said the UK should build on its strengths in the development of next generation battery technology, officials said.


The UK has made a major commitment through its £274 million investment in the Faraday Battery Challenge and earlier investments through the Automotive Propulsion Centre. Building a Gigafactory – a large-scale battery technology factory for electric vehicles – is one of the plans.


The Gigafactory is a major manufacturing facility producing ‘cells’ which are the basic building blocks of a battery. Carmakers are expected to source cells from supplier and assembly into battery packs. For example, a factory making 200,000 electric vehicles, each with a 75kWh battery pack, would have a cell requirement of 15GWh.


May set out new commitments aimed at making electric vehicles more convenient to own, such as making England the first place in the world where every new-build home will be fitted with an electric car charge-point.


She also committed to bringing forward plans to regulate charge-points so that they use ‘smart’ technology which will send signals to electric vehicles to charge them at different times of the day, encouraging off-peak charging to keep costs down for consumers and helping prepare the energy system for mass uptake of electric vehicles


The UK government’s ambition is for better access to rapid charge-points by 2030.